These American lives

Book: American Lives: A Reader

Author: various

Published: 2010 (University of Nebraska Press)

Pages: 300

These chunks pulled from full-length memoirs made good episodic reading that brought me back to earth.

All of them had the same sheen of quiet honesty, which was great because it pulled me into the humor and gravitas with equal strength. But that same sheen made reading things like multiple excerpts on losing children (in utero and born) less affecting than they would have been standing alone. Some of the excerpts were so short I couldn’t tell why they bothered to use that section instead of another.

My favorite, “Son of Mr.Green Jeans: A Meditation on Missing Fathers,” was set up as a list of dictionary-style definitions mixed with personal connections to the concepts being explained. It nicely spiraled into itself to make its point in the way that a kid with a missing father would piece together his feelings about that as he grew up and slowly learned what it meant. That would’ve been super annoying to read in a whole 300-page book, but as a collected piece itself it was really effective.

None of these memoirs were uncomfortably navel-gazing; they all gave good reasons outside their authors for being written. Latched together, they made a smooth patchwork of the genre.

Feeding the higher education trolls

Book: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic

Author: Professor X (…Charles? Is that you?)

Published: 2011 (Viking)

Pages: 250

So should everyone go to college or not?

Can we just pretend this sidewise thing is symbolic?

Professor X says no. He says telling everybody they should go to college is comparable to telling everybody they should live in a nice house, complete with the financial and existential overextension that caused the housing bubble to explode all over underprepared people’s faces and drag into debt everyone who bought into it.

Okay. I can understand that. I even like this parallel and how he eases into it through deeply personal accounts of how he got sucked into the needless real estate game himself and how that made him start teaching night classes in the first place. And I love how he talks about writing and literature. He must be a hell of an adjunct lecture.

But his passion for teaching his abstract and lovely subject clashes really loudly with his belief that a lot less professions need a class in it. He aims for reform but lands on snobby. He doesn’t have a plan to wean businesses off the need for a degree that’s creeping down the job ladder. He just tells us it sucks, and why. Which is a start.

This book was expanded from a magazine article, and after a short while, it gets repetitious enough to tell. In the back half, he pads with examples that sound almost exactly like his first examples. He also addresses the criticisms he’s received from his article, so parts sound like defensive troll-baiting, which is disconcerting in a physical book.

Don’t feed the trolls, Professor X. Just stick to writing about writing. You’re so much nicer with that. 

Tina Fey gives me cheap laughs.

Book: Bossypants
Author: Tina Fey
Published: 2011 (Little, Brown)
Pages: 275

"Who doesn't like Tina Fey?" could be the subtitle of this book. Based on the reading I snatched during my lunch breaks by picking this up in the campus bookstore without actually buying it, I will attempt to answer.

• People who truly believe that women can't be funny. (I picture these guys as old-fashioned clockmakers holding Humor Cogs and shaking their heads regretfully at broken ladies.)
• People who are disappointed at how normal and good Tina Fey's life has been and are probably just jealous that this disproves the theory that one has to have a shitty life to get any material from it. 
• People who have refused to watch SNL since the 1970s because they say it went downhill right after that. 

Fey's very good at making fun of herself in a way that brings her down to hardworking everylady level. She loves her life and gets deprecating laughs out of the awesome bits, which makes her more human, and sarcastic enthusiasm about the stressful bits, which show how much she secretly likes them. She's also excellent at inserting one-liners into good advice to break up the earnestness just when it starts to get a little weird.

She is still a TV writer, and that shows in the bounciness of her prose, like it really wants to come out of her mouth instead of stay on the page. That's not a bad thing. In fact, that probably helped me read this faster, an essential part of the stealth read strategy. I feel like Fey would understand the maybe-not-completely-kosher habits of a reader/writer with a day job and make fun of them before joining in with a giant sandwich. 

Scandal!

Book: Smile Pretty and Say Jesus: The Last Great Days of PTL

Author: Hunter James

Published: 1993 (University of Georgia Press)

Pages: 210

On the surface, this is a tale of greed and denial and hypocrisy channeled through one of the biggest evangelical Christian empires this side of the Rocky Mountains. Jim and Tammy Fay Bakker start their ministry with coins rattling in their collection cigar box, got on TV through a masterful puppet show that evolved into a gi-fucking-normous media/theme park thing that made them enough money to burn through with Cadillacs and makeup and Kmart shopping sprees until their financial mismanagement and Jim's sexual eccentricities were exposed. Then Jerry Faulwell took over, trip over some of the exact same problems of his own (although on a smaller scale), and the whole shebang ended on a half-finished luxury hotel taken over by Native Americans who now owned the land on which it was getting built. 

I'm pretty sure everybody knows the surface bit of the story, or can at least trace its familiar tropes. That makes it no less enjoyable to read about. Not with a malicious anti-religious smugness, but with a wonder at exactly how much people can trust their leaders and how much these leaders can built on shaky grounds before everything just goes SMASH.

But take a closer look into this, and you'll get the equally interesting and far more worrying glimpse of a newspaper man driven insane by his job.

Late nights, early mornings, no distinguishes between the two, camping out for hours to grab two seconds of a subject's time, chasing phone calls, editors spitting profanity like sparks from blowtorches--these are all pretty standard for an old-school paper journalist. James, who eventually reveals that he's over fifty during his coverage of this scandal, should be used to it if maybe getting tired of all the abuse. Instead, he drops in these stream-of-consciousness lines, even a whole chapter, that drop psychological hints about how much he hates all of this. He misses deadlines, drinks and takes downers, doesn't seem to know how to get out of all of his misery. He doesn't enjoy any of the chase.


And based on his continual failure to get close enough to any of the major people in this to fill out 500-word articles, I really wonder how he managed that for full book.

Somehow he manages to forge a great connection between his personal downfall and the one he's supposed to be covering. It does make me wonder about his career after this, though. Was it his last stand as well as the Bakkers' and Faulwell's? He never says. I hope he retired into one of those "old guy" desk jobs he was talking about by the end. 

Which is sort of a horrible thing to wish on a reporter. But dude was worn OUT. 

Growing up

Book: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Author: Alison Bechdel

Published: 2006 (Houghton Mifflin)

Pages: 232

I’m calling this a memoir because the author uses her family story and all their real names, including her own. She doesn’t dress it up as fiction, so it’s not, and she focuses way more on a vaguely stream-of-consciousness fixation on her relationship to her dad and how they handled each other’s sexuality than on a chronological run-through of her childhood.

Bechdel and her father are presented as inverts, as in she always wants to be and acts like a stereotypical boy and her father has spent his entire marriage repressing his female urges. This makes him cold and resentful to his family, and her gradually more confused until she finds a section about lesbianism in her university library and starts reading about that instead of her class-assigned Ulysses.

They each deal with their own homosexuality in opposite ways: he buries his under a pile of shame that occasionally explodes and leads to a car accident that might have been suicide; she pulls hers out of its hiding place and makes it a big part of who she is. She comes out as the more adjusted, better-prepared, world-weary second generation worried about but also smug about not making the same mistakes she saw her father go through. Her experience isn’t any less traumatic, but it makes her stronger instead of destroying her. I think she won.

The fluid artwork’s bold lines kept me entirely in her worlds, in her parents’ knick-knack cluttered house that her dad was always improving, in libraries (more than one and they were all drawn differently, not just Building That Was Not My House No. 2!), in her dorm room and the funeral parlor.

OH YEAH. Her dad also inherited a funeral parlor from his parents. It wasn’t a full-time business in their small town, but the whole family worked when the need came along. I wish she would’ve integrated this into more of her general telling, but she left it in one smallish section. By then end of the book I wanted to know more about the funeral home and less about what her father’s death might mean.

That might make me a terrible human being. But your Constant Reader never lets life get in the way of good content.   

Troubled life as told through good food

Book: Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

Author: Gabrielle Hamilton

Published: 2011 (Random House)

Pages: 291

All throughout reading this book, I daydreamed about what to cook for future meals of my own. None of them remotely resembled the meals Hamilton was describing, which, and hang with me for a second, I count as good food writing because she caught me up in the actual act of creating and making food rather than imitating her, room-temperature-egg for room-temperature-egg.

She started out in a family where her dad held annual lamb roasting parties and her mom always had something on the stove and Hamilton herself fell into waitressing, catering, and finally running her own kitchen as a way of scratching independence out of a hostile mess of early drug addiction and neglect.

And it works fairly well--by chaining her to 18-hour days in an industry she never really wanted to stay in, true, and giving her a green-card husband she married for the hell of it and spends a ridiculous amount of time and energy on considering how they don’t actually love each other. It’s this that casts a weird mist of doom onto the whole back half of her narrative; the part that is usually reserved for unconditional redemption made me worry about the life choices she seems to know were kind of shitty even as she lives with them. It’s refreshing to read a memoir that doesn’t advertise hard work as a guaranteed ticket to happiness, that cooking embraces her as she embraces it but it still takes work on both sides just like any loving relationship.

But… I keep going back to her husband, and why they tried to act like a real family even when they had no reason or incentive or pressure to do so. It’s disturbing in a quiet way that she never explains and presents as a fairly normal if troubled fact of her life. Possibly she stayed for a bigger sense of community in their annual trips to his family in Italy, something she had never been a part of before and might not have a chance to be a part of any other way? Maybe? I don’t know.

Her use of food as a way of expressing her fighting chance in life makes me care. Her writing is excellent.

Me read more David Sedaris today.

Book: Me Talk Pretty One Day

Author: David Sedaris

Published: 2000 (Back Bay Books)

Pages: 272

My thoughts on David Sedaris will be explained through two recent, unrelated quotes.

“We have his books at the library,” said my boyfriend during a return trip to Barnes and Nobel. (Hello, my name is Melanie, and I’m addicted to ALL OF THE BOOKS.)

But if I buy them, I can keep his words close enough to reach for and curl up in like my college comforter whenever I need them. They are mine to soothe on demand for however long it takes me to wear out the spines, and then again however long it takes the duct tape that repaired the spines to wear out. And then I’ll just have to be extra careful when I get that special kind of depressed that well-written flippant humor can make better.

“Don’t worry so much, okay?” said a friend after we spent a lunch talking about life after college.

It’s good advice. I do anyway, and so does David Sedaris, and he’s so good at making light of it that it makes me laugh at the absurdity of all this worrying while recognizing and appreciating the solemn undertow that’ll drown us all if we think about it too much.

That is why I bought this book and have already devoured it and don’t regret it at all.

Feminism 101

Book: Reading Women: How the Greatest Books of Feminism Changed My Life


Author: Stephanie Staal


Published: 2011 (PublicAffairs)


Pages: 264


I finished this book about revisited feminism right before I unwrapped a new dress and pulled it on over tights to go over to my boyfriend's house. 

I spent the whole clothes time wondering who, exactly, was I wearing this for? Me? My boyfriend? Because I wanted him to think I looked cute? Because I wanted to look cute for myself? But what if looking cute for myself is subliminal code for looking cute in a way that he and society think look cute, so there's not actually any of me in this decision at all? ...How the hell am I ever supposed to know what's me and what's for him and what's Western societal pressure on the female bits of me?


Reading about feminism always makes me wonder that without giving me any answers. 


This book charts the experiences of a lady who revisits her Fem Text class at Bernard when her professional and family lives are doing that thing where they don't work together. Classic feminist dilemma that--say it with me now--she never thought would happen to her. 


And I loved reading about it. She writes in the perfect deft balance of understated confessional personal narrative and academic research. Her readings make her think about her real life and where she's at now in her real life makes her understand the readings in depths she couldn't get close to when she was a 20-year-old undergraduate immersed in an all-girl's college. And y'all, she's incredibly insightful about the vague, impractical, and hypocritical points of feminism while still being firmly in favor of the movement because, come on. Women are people too. 


She doesn't come to any more solid a conclusion than I ever do, though. She's glad she took the class during a whole new generation of thought, and she's glad it's made her appreciate how hard her life balance is and that it really might be worth it in the end, but she's not changing anything radical in her life because she read Vindication for the Rights of Woman again. I was sort of hoping there'd be an Awesome Gentlelady Who Doesn't Give a Fuck About Gender Roles No Seriously magic formula somewhere in there, but alas. 


Welp. I don't want to end on "alas" because I really liked this book, so I will tell you that after a good boyfriend visit I decided that I do dress for myself first but angle for outside appreciation. At least when I'm going out in public. 

The writing life

Book: Fiction Ruined My Family

Author: Jeanne Darst

Published: 2011 (Riverhead Books)

Pages: 303

Friday night my boyfriend and I rode over to a shopping center with a movie theater, fully intending to see Young Adult in big plushy seats that were not at either of our residences. But there was a Barnes and Noble store, too. And when he went, “Oh we have time to browse…” we missed our movie and read together instead. This is, happily, a regular occurrence.

And my whole point is to tell you that I fell off the book-buying abstinence wagon again. Damn those discount shelves. I plowed through Darst’s memoir because she’s so good at writing about destructive behavior as if it were as normal as her family treated it. She talks about her slowly dawning realization that she was decades behind everyone else in getting her shit together, and about how her dad’s failed author ambitions started the hairline cracks that grew into gaping fissures in their lives, and in honest detail about how she survived in New York while drunk on a waitress’s salary (it involved lots of mooching and bodily creativity when her shared hallway bathroom was occupied and endless peanut butter sandwiches).

And it was funny. I was laughing about horrible things, about her mother losing her skirt in a drunken stupor only to find it shoved up under her sweater, about her sneaking into her neighbor’s apartment to steal the disco record he always played, about her and one of her sisters making garbage bag diapers to make sure they didn’t spread any more pubic lice after they doused themselves in treatment, about how she always lied to her dad about what she was reading so she’d appear well-read and how that would just make him give her five thousand new suggestions and how that meant they never really talked about anything having to do with real life.

I buy, or check out, more books because they’re bricks in my wall that blocks out the void. They’re my solid proof that yes, something DOES matter in this world, and when I find writings about someone who’s discovered the same thing, it’s something I don’t want to put down until I fully understand how they found out.

Written vs. spoken humor

Book: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)

Author: Minday Kaling

Published: 2011 (Crown Archetype)

Pages: 222

This is a very gently funny book compared to what I thought it would be. I mean, it’s not like I watch The Office, but I hear things and most of it is snarky. Which I love, and which Kaling is not, at least not on the page.

She tries to be, in a way that instead underscores her earnestness and makes her look like she’s grasping for quirk in a fairly well-adjusted life. Some of her stuff is interesting and some of her stuff is funny, but it’s rarely both. The section on her first struggling years in New York City glossed over the exact things I wanted to know the most: how did she survive while not making money from comedy? I don’t know. She doesn’t say. Day job, yeah sure, but what? Office drone? Lap dancer? Kosher butcher? From what it sounds like, she and her girlfriend roommates just generated enough awesome to power through their rent until their one-act about being Ben Affleck and Matt Damon got into circulation.

I did enjoy reading about her childhood and her first job interviews in the TV industry. There was enough natural weirdness in those anecdotes that she didn’t have to dress them up, merely present them. Her observational humor was the exact opposite, a lot of form without substance.

I get the feeling that Kaling, the, you know, TV and stage writer and actor, is so used to the rhythms and extra padding (inflection, facial expressions, body gestures) of spoken humor that she forgot or didn’t realize that written humor needs a whole new set of scaffolding to make it work. 

"A great girlfriend gift"

Book: Just Let Me Lie Down: Necessary Terms for the Half-Insane Working Mom

Author: Kristin van Ogtrop

Published: 2010 (Little, Brown and Company)

Pages: 259

Awe: the state in which I hold working parents. I have taken care of kids (daycare summer job) and am right now easing myself into a professional life; separately, each of those things have exhausted my punk ass to the point where I am really, sincerely, bewilderingly curious as to how the hell people do both at the same time without keeling over.

But: everything I’ve read about it has such a well-worn fondly crazy lightheartedness that I can’ tell what’s exaggerated for laughs and what’s damped down for sentiment. Van Ogtrop’s stories don’t go any deeper than the rest of them.

Can: it be something you just have to DO, like moving your legs when you want to learn how to run, or when you discover that nobody actually knows how to be an official adult and everyone just b.s.es their way into it until something clicks?

Does: the blurb that says “The ideal girlfriend gift!” mean a great present for a significant other or something to give a female friend? Either way sounds a little insulting and presumptuous.

Everything: this does not make me want children. Like, at all. I’ll settle for cooing at them while their mothers are preoccupied, thanks, so maybe both of us can visit the other side of life for the brief second that will be all we need. Also, I wanna play with the Legos.

Lonely vs. alone

Book: The Late Bloomer’s Revolution

Author: Amy Cohen

Published: 2007 (Hyperion)

Pages: 288

Lonely and alone aren’t the same thing. I think people confuse them too much, especially in artistic depictions of normal life. People are social animals, right? So we’re all miserable when we have no one else around us, so for happy endings everyone has to be paired up with his or her sex of choice. Yes?

No, not really. Amy Cohen finally realizes that, and she made me cry while going through her process.

Really, it’s your standard woman-discovers-herself-through-dating-way-past-when-she-thought-she-would-be-settled-down arc, thrown together with learning how to ride a bike at age 35 and being okay when her fiancé left her because he didn’t want kids.

That was the ending. Her fiancé went to live on the opposite coast without her after she gave him an ultimatum: go and live without her or stay in New York with her. And it didn’t destroy her, and I wanted to shout this ending in Hollywood’s direction so maybe they’d get a good idea or two. Woman discovers hard but necessary decision actually makes her grow! Yes!

Her book made me cry because it made me think about what being lonely really means. It’s not something that can just magically go away with the addition of another warm body; she was loneliest when she was trying to make connections work with the wrong people. And that is just an awful feeling, this giant black hole that opens up in time and swallows everything until you’re exhausted and bored and have no idea what to do next so you don’t do anything, which makes it worse.

Cohen’s a writer good at setting up empathy by simply telling her story. She’s also wearing a tank top, jeans, and Converse in her author photo, so I feel like we’d get along. That means she’s done her job right.    

Drunken adventures in going blind

Book: Slackjaw

Author: Jim Knipfel

Pages: 231

Published: 1999 (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putman)

I like Jim Knipel, starting with his last name (you pronounce the K) and ending with the narrow fedora-shaded face in his author photo. He sounds like an excellent person to take to a bar and get drunk on a boring midweek night.

Which is exactly what his book feels like, a long tale spun frankly and wryly somewhere dark and smoky that tastes like beer. According to his roughly chronological stories, that’s exactly where most of them start or end up, launching or killing a long day of the author bouncing his cynical personal struggle against weird characters on his way to get things done that may or may not be illegal.

Knipfel gives the standard self-destruction narrative unexpected texture with normal loving parents, a genetic disease that makes him start going blind by age twenty, deft and liberal touches of black humor, a frank understanding of his own suicidal impulses (every year or eighteen months, he says, living just gets too much), and, eventually, a foldout cane that goes “flubbity-flubbity.”

It’s hilarious and compulsive and peters out into cranky optimism that feels well-earned by the end. 

The story of a beastlet

Book: Marley and Me

Author: John Grogan

Published: 2005 (HarperCollins)

Pages: 289

Anytime an author writes about a pet, I go “Awwwwwwww…” without thinking, okay? And then I reach down to scratch my own furry bundle of neuroses behind her ears, maybe feed her a piece of sandwich because that’s really all she wants in life.

So I didn’t go into this book objectively at all. But I still wasn’t impressed.

It’s a good portrait of life with a dog. Grogan knows how to place the right amount of importance on ordinary things to make them important details in the story he’s telling. But it’s really obvious that he used wry jokes to gloss over some of the tougher details that might’ve made this less generic. He and his wife seem to lead a fairly (but far from completely) charmed life in which Marley the overzealous lab wrecked playful havoc, which sounds adorable on the page but probably was a pain in the ass to deal with in real life.

The biggest example that jumped out at me was their professional lives. They were both newspaper reporters in Florida, and he does wax nostalgic about it, but he never gave me any sort of picture of the office or work he loved so much except near the end when he confessed to using his work gathering column ideas as an excuse to wander around the state while getting paid.

That DOES sound like an awesome job. Tell me more about it, and tell me anything—anything at all!—about how you dealt with such a time-consuming bundle of puppy while both of you were working full time. I got none of that, except about how his wife Jenny would come home for lunch and play with the dog then, prompting me to wonder what their hours were. And there is one sentence—ONE—that talks about how Jenny struggled to balance raising two young children and a dog while downshifting her work to part-time and home-based.

I just spent more words on their careers than Grogan did.

Anyway, it was cute and read like the wind after my two weeks of struggling with cardiovascular biomechanics, but it wasn’t original. That’s a bit of a cardinal sin around here.